Defect Tracking Integration

Loupe Agent and Server can integrate directly with some defect tracking systems to automatically open, update, and reopen issues when qualifying errors are found in sessions.

• Configure how sessions relate to your defect tracking system:  Map the product, application, versions from Loupe to the categorization method you use to track issues.
• Separate support & development issues:  Map released versions to different areas than development versions to separate production support from development.

Automatically Manage Issues - Better than Email Integration

Each error in a matching session is analyzed to see if it has already been recorded in the defect tracking system.  This integration ensures:

• Errors with a new unique signature will open new issues.
• If an issue reoccurs in a new version after it has been closed it will be reopened.
• Loupe sessions and issues will be related so you can easily see all of the sessions in Loupe for a particular issue.

All of this is possible because Loupe queries the defect tracking system while analyzing sessions to determine the right action to take.

View Issues and Related Sessions within Loupe

You can jump right to the list of issues in the defect tracking system and see all of the related sessions from within Loupe. 

• See all of the other errors in sessions related to the current issue to recognize patterns of errors
• See the characteristics of sessions with an error, like operating system, time zone, and software version.
• Drill down to the details of each occurrence in the session
• Open the issue in the defect tracking system directly from Loupe.

Supported Defect Tracking Systems

In this release, two systems are supported:

• CounterSoft Gemini:  A web-based project management platform for Scrum, Issue & Defect Tracking.   
• FogBugz: A web-based issue tracking, customer support, and project planning system.

Additional systems will be added based on user requests - if we don't support the system you need, please let us know.  Because this integration is done using the Loupe Add In API, new systems can be added outside of a release. 

Email Notifications

You can elect to receive email notifications when sessions arrive at the Server.  These are configured directly in Loupe Desktop but run on the Server so you can be alerted whether you're at your computer or not.

Sample Error Message Email

For more information, see Loupe Server - Notifications.

Loupe Add Ins

The Loupe Desktop and Server support a new AddIn API that lets you extend the user interface with a range of capabilities including:

• Custom Session Analysis:  Access all of the data of each session as it arrives, allowing it to be exported into an external system, indexed, or otherwise interpreted.
• User Interface Views:  You can create custom visualizations of session summaries and full session data that integrate directly into the Loupe Desktop user experience.
• Custom Commands:  Additional commands can be added to the Loupe Desktop, sessions, and log messages to perform unique actions.

To make it easier to develop powerful extensions to Loupe the AddIn API includes:

• Distributed configuration management:  It's easy to have different configuration sections for Server-specific, user-specific, machine-specific and shared team options.  You can provide a configuration user interface that can edit all of the configuration from Loupe Desktop and copy the configuration back to the Server without requiring any IT involvement.
• Secure credentials:  You can easily store multiple sets of credentials that can be user-specific, machine-specific, and hub-specific.  These are encrypted using the Microsoft CAPI RSA Hybrid key cryptography.

Loupe Live Viewer Enhancements

Shows More Information

The Live Viewer has been updated to show all of the information related to a log message including full exception details, details xml, and related source code.  The refresh performance has also been improved to be much more responsive with less overhead.

Display the Viewer through the Log API

You can now ask the Agent to display the Loupe Live Viewer by calling the ShowLiveViewer Method method.  This acts just like the end-user pressing the hot key, including running on a separate UI thread and will do nothing if it isn't safe to display the Live Viewer.

Custom Filtering

You can provide a method to filter the log messages displayed by the Live Viewer, both the built-in Loupe Live Viewer and the Live Viewer Control.  This makes it easier to show the viewer to users without revealing sensitive information.

Display Buffered Messages

When you add your own log viewer control to a form you can choose whether to have it display the current queue of buffered messages (which will go back to the start of the process or the maximum buffer size) or have it start fresh.

Other New Features in This Release

PostSharp 2.0 Support

Loupe now includes PostSharp 2.0 as part of the installation and provides an aspect library for .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0.  See Using PostSharp with Loupe for more information on using PostSharp to instrument your application without code.

Loupe Desktop Run at Log On / Keep Running

The Loupe Desktop can now be left running more easily and can be set to automatically start when you log on.  In this mode it uses fewer resources than when the full application is loaded yet still collects and processes information from a Loupe Server.

Preview Log Message Errors and Warnings in Loupe Desktop

The Repository View now can show you the summary of all of the errors and warnings within each session without having to open the session.  This saves a lot of time when you just want to get an overview of a session.  The summary is based on the results of running session analysis so it's only available in the User Repository.

Intellisense for Configuration File Editing

The installation will now add an Xsd for Loupe configuration for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 to make it easier to edit configuration files.

Add Multiple Metrics to a chart at once

You can now add many metrics to a Metric Chart at the same time by dragging the folder that contains all of the metrics you want to add over to the Chart at once. 

Visual Studio 2010 Improvements

Loupe now ships with integrated help for Visual Studio 2010 and has been updated to work with the new .NET 4.0 Client Profile.

Defects Fixed In This Release

This is the list of issues fixed since the last release version (2.1.1.629)

Agent

• Fixed: Packager fails when running in a process set to a neutral culture (e.g. EN instead of EN-US)
• Fixed: Agent logs excessive information about its own behavior when exclusively called from the .NET Trace API.
• Fixed: Agent doesn't record time zone name correctly when recording time change.
• Fixed: Setting SendSessionsOnExit to true after EndSession is called has no effect.
• Fixed: Windows 7 and Windows Vista Enterprise editions incorrectly tagged as Windows 2008 Server.
• Fixed: Live Viewer tooltips permanently disabled despite API setting.
• Fixed: Live Viewer column sorting doesn't work.
• Fixed: Error manager dialog can deadlock application when called during a form OnLoad event.
• Fixed: Agent shows WinForms/WPF/Console applications as crashed and loses the last 15 seconds of information if they are still running when the user logs off or the computer is shutdown.
• Fixed: Extraneous ApplicationExit event can be raised in WinForms and causes premature EndSession call.
• Fixed: PostSharp Agent triggers code analysis warning due to static constructor.
• Fixed: Agent can show user name through file paths of assemblies when in anonymous mode.
• Fixed: Network change events always thing TCP/IP configuration has changed.
• Fixed: Extremely long command lines can cause the session to fail to transfer via packages or the Server.
• Fixed: ASP.NET Web sites can't use Log.SendSessionsOnExit because it fails to locate Gibraltar.Package.exe.

Loupe Desktop

• Fixed: Chart tooltips are hard to read under Windows XP Standard Theme.
• Fixed: Expanding a repository view loads its default view and displays it without changing the apparent selected view.
• Fixed: Repository View doesn't update correctly when all sessions of the current filtered value are removed. 
• Fixed: Creating metric chart of event metric doesn't select the default event metric value as the initial value.
• Fixed: Repository View doesn't gracefully handle missing session data (when sessions are removed in the background during display)
• Fixed: Licensing dialog expiration message displays badly on Windows 2000/XP.
• Fixed: Saving a package during application close ignores the save-as file name.
• Fixed: Double-clicking a sampled metric with a chart active throws an exception.
• Fixed: Sessions being analyzed when Loupe Desktop exits are never retried.
• Fixed: Sessions by Time Frame summary view ignores future sessions (due to time zone differences).
• Fixed: Needs to periodically refresh time-based licensing & hub displays while running
• Fixed: Opening a GLF (raw log file) as a package fails with an exception.
• Fixed: Attempting to reopen a package that is already open generates an internal error then displays nothing.
• Fixed: The tools property sheet should not show on the Package property page as it does not apply.
• Fixed: Marking session as read or unread on start dashboard does nothing.
• Fixed: Suppressing the "Other" chart group that is composed of many groups is very slow and can make the application appear to hang.
• Fixed: Suppressing all of the samples within a chart group doesn't prevent the point from displaying in the chart.

Server

• Fixed: Automatic Pruning is disabled by default and can't be enabled.
• Fixed: Records licensing error that public keys do not match.
• Fixed: Clients that fall far behind submitting data can cause server to take too long to determine the sessions to request, causing timeouts.
• Fixed: Uploading large files can be very slow due to server overhead of tracking uploaded fragments.